Sunday Bird’s Eye View Schedule for 4/1

FRI 3/30 (2:45PM) — Another major change. AAA-SJ God Bless It vs Winner-SJHA/Ukourt has been postponed to 4/8. Also, we will have to check and see if PHHS is even available on 4/15 for a Repeat Championship. If not, then the Repeat Championship might also occur on 4/8. See, this is simply what happens when I’m dealt a terrible hand. First off, GBI has a timeframe of 9a-2p or >7p (our spreadsheets are not defaulted to handle weird ones like this), which all season long we’ve misinterpreted as “9a-” which means anytime — we have gotten lucky. However, UKourt’s timeframe is 1p-6p and Hibachi’s is 1p+, so if I pin GBI at 2p, which is hard to do considering there’s other games going on but let’s assume I could do it, then I’d have to force UKourt vs Hibachi at 1p which results in a back-to-back, which we try to avoid as much as possible.

Since my hands are tied with these three teams giving me so little breathing space, then I have no choice but to postpone the GBI game until 4/8, whereby the game will probably need to be scheduled at 1p or 2p if you simply do the math. So that just goes to show, once again, that when you sign up for this league, often times you need to be cognizant of what other teams are having as their availability. Again, competitiveness is valued by me a lot so I’d rather go out of my way to schedule two good teams together, but at the same time it’s also a cooperative situation. So if you can do something about the schedule of the OTHER conflict that you have, then please do so.

The other example are the two guys (all-stars) on aaa-sf Who’s Next and aaa-oak Colossal. They are overlapped this week and with all the crazy timeframes, THE GOOD OF THE MANY OUTWEIGHS THE GOOD OF THE ONE. In other words, who cares what happens to players, I’ve got to make sure teams merely have their game set. I mean, that’s the risk you take.

And then I really can’t stand it when guys say they are playing in so-and-so tournament. Look, you made that choice. You chose to put that tournament ahead of your Dream League playoff game. Well, your opponent didn’t. So please, stop acting as if you get to play in every tournament as well as Dream League and Dream League is supposed to bend over backwards to allow you to do both. That is a ridiculous expectation of my time and energy.

At the end of the day, who really gives a rat’s ass about “customer service”? It’s all mathematics, people. Either you can make a timeframe or you can’t. If you want me to apologize (for having bad math?) and make you feel better about the results of the mathematics, here you go…

I APOLOGIZE TO ALL THE PEOPLE I PISS OFF WITH MY BAD CUSTOMER SERVICE IN THE FUTURE.

…but it does not change ONE IOTA of the mathematics involved. Only you can change that. Please pick up players that make sense. Get guys who don’t want to play in every tournament, on every team, and win every single championship in every single league under the sun. Find guys who are committed to YOUR DREAM LEAGUE TEAM. Signup for divisions that make sense and that add to the community of fair competitiveness and exciting games. And finally, please don’t act entitled.

There is one constant variable in all of this: ME.

I will always try to do whatever I can and make things fair and base my decisions on mathematics. Often times, I sacrifice my own teams or my own ability to play. But if it’s too complicated or too much work for me, forget it. Not worth my time and definitely don’t get paid enough to twist around backwards like that.

I hope you can understand my frustrations lately. We have literally changed the schedule 3 times since the tipoffs posted and were supposed to be set in stone. Then people are constantly texting me complaining about this or that. Show me a customer service agent on the Earth that can handle that stress. It’s not one or two guys and I’m not singling out any of the teams I mentioned, because there’s more that I didn’t even mention. It’s just a little bit too much sometimes and if I don’t write out all this crap, then you don’t feel my pain.

Also, this all needs to be said because lots of times my dealings are only with captains and not every captain is good at communicating these issues to their team, or their teammates are just not as cooperative in these situations. It’s good that some non-captain players will be reading this and gain a better appreciation of how everything fits together.

With that, let’s hope for another week of competitive games like we had last week (8 overtimes!).

FRI 3/30 (9:15AM) — The BHPY 430,530p games have been pushed back to 5,6p so that Pure can make it in a comfortable amount of time. Pure has actually paid for the extra gym time.

We left off REC-SF- matchups. Last LB Game and Championship has been added at 9:30am and 12:30pm BHPY. There is no other way. Sorry to Hapa for the first game being outside of timeframe, but they are outweighed by gym availability and the other teams’ timeframes.

Kurruption said they can’t field a team at 7p due to another league. I don’t know why they place this other league ahead of Dream League, but I’m making an exception this one time. Their game vs Colossal has been moved to 2pm WKRC and Kurruption will pay the extra $10 it costs to play the game at WKRC instead of BCRC.

The other thing is, when it is Thursday and your team notices a major structural change to the schedule, your captain should be texting me, not emailing me. The reason is that email is slow to respond and we would need to make changes on the fly asap.

THU 3/29 (2:30PM) — The final tipoffs are below, as well as the major issues listed. Read the previous posts and take a grain of salt… THU 3/29 (11:45AM) — Below is a rough draft. Everything is in chronological order. As veteran ref Tony Booker would say, “Let’s let it marinate for a bit.” The schedule with the most problems is at BCRC. Teams will just have to remember the Dream League mantra: In any other league, you’d be already eliminated from the playoffs, so you’ll have to suck it up and take one for the good of the community (i.e., not everyone can be pleased) and remember that in Dream League, overall competitiveness and parity trumps schedule. In City League XYZ first of all, you’re season probably is already done. But anyways in City League XYZ, you would have a random set of teams all playing in some morning. In Dream League, the set of teams is obviously NOT random; it is a culmination of 10 years of making sure teams are in the right division. The sacrifice? Having times that every single team agrees on. It all balances out and encourages teams to pickup guys who are ultra gung-ho about hoop and ready to play anytime.

THU 3/29 (10:45AM) — The many tipoff conflicts are creating a scheduling bottleneck. I’ll have to push back my estimation of tipoff publishing until 5pm today. Meanwhile, here are some MAJOR issues we are working through…

a/r-sf+: Winner-Braves/Who’sNext at Winner-FullTilt/StunGuns — therefore this game gets postponed to 4/8. That means the Last LB Game and Championship gets pushed back to 4/15, with possible Repeat Champ on 4/22. I’m out of town 4/29, so let’s get this all done by 4/22, otherwise we string this along into next season, which is just kind of stupid quite frankly.

a/r-sj-: #6 Wii Not Fit at #1 BBOF — same issue as the one for a/r-sf+, but Wii is indicating they might be able to play in the morning, so I’ve left it on the docket.

aaa-sf: Falcons are the only team out of 3 in the Losers Bracket that hasn’t asked for a late game. In these instances, I go with the majority. It is simple and straightforward: I would rather have 1 team mad at me than 3.

AL/NL: Rangers play Trybe in Oakland. Trybe has traveled more this season.

WKRC: There might be more games here depending on the tipoff conflicts, but we try to minimize the games there because this gym is more expensive.

Again, the two a/r-sf+ games have been removed from the schedule table. The rest of it, you can already see that we have major tipoff issues in the pref1/pref2 columns in red. We’ll try to work through these, but worst case, we could end up postponing more games. Also look at SF and the tons of requests for late games. How are we going to fit all those games into late slots? I have no idea at this point.

THU 3/29 (9:45AM) — As you can see from the Playoff Brackets post, we just spent a lot of time consolidating all the playoff brackets onto one page. Thank goodness for Google Spreadsheets. Right now we are figuring out matchups, then doing timeframes. Also, we’ll look at special requests, which are linked to the MSR page from every previous Bird’s Eye post. Sorry for the delay. I would estimate being done with tipoffs at 2pm today.